


i'm stuck in lucid dreams

by meios



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Alcohol, Arson, Attempted Murder, Breathplay, Dogs, Ghosts, Hallucinations, Jason has a dog-walking business, Knifeplay, M/M, Murder, Painplay, Self-Harm, and also destroys things?, mentions of Roy Harper/Jason Todd/Koriand'r, nothing is happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 16:07:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meios/pseuds/meios
Summary: Matthew 4:8: Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [This is based very loosely on this A Softer World post.](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1194/)

It had been less like a murder and more like a fetish gone too far. The blood had been both of theirs, and it crosses Jason’s mind that he never even learned the man’s name, never once before they’d found this motel and shorn the clothes from their bodies like sheep, bleating to the beatings in their chests. When the man had produced the blade, the scalpel, it had been with excitement that Jason had taken it, an extension of his fingers, drawn bloody street maps across bruised ribs.

 

He had fucked him with it because it had been (maybe) handed to him, because he’d been too high and heavy to ask anything other than _good?_ at the gurgles and the moans, at the whimper that had escaped the suicidal man when Jason had entered him, kissing an open mouth with a scarlet tongue, and the climax had been quick, too quick, the drugs dulling any pain, the wetness of the red the only true evidence that there had been a death— _would_ be a death, rather.

 

The blood on his wrists is Jason’s. The blood on his cock is not.

 

He’s breathing heavily, eyes black holes, stretched out and blank, and the gasoline had been a surprise, but the card key had already been in the man’s possession, the clothes in the dresser well worn, and he’s—oh. The reaction is mechanical: showers the gore away, tugs on jeans that don’t belong to him, a tee for a band that he does not know. He lights a cigarette with the lighter he finds in his boots, douses everything with the gasoline.

 

Fire is wild. It bends only to its own will, that of Mother Nature’s: it follows no rules, has no guilt, no morals. His stomach is a tight knot of something he has no name for, warmth at its pit at the stench of petrol, the stirrings of arousal at the escape of death, at the sudden rush of adrenaline and endorphins here. The room won’t survive, the motel won’t—the bodies and their killers in the other rooms—

 

He shudders. The screams on the way in hadn’t been—

 

He takes the Bible from the nightstand because he sees it and it makes sense, and _the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor_ , and Jason takes the gasoline and opens the door, makes a trail along the hallway and ends it at the door. The reception desk is vacant. Ash falls from the end of his cigarette; Jason smiles like a bullet, fast and sharp.

 

He strikes a match.

 

*******

 

The dogs don’t judge.

 

The park in central Gotham is big enough that his pack of hounds is able to take up half of the path without bothering anyone, their barks answered with other noises, and though Debra the twelve-year-old Shetland still believes she is young enough to chase the ducks, he wouldn’t trade this for the world. He smells smoke on his clothes, though there is no fire; he hears the screams he had mistaken for pleasure behind closed doors; Jason remembers the good dope and the hard lines of muscle and the devil on the mountain, and he doesn’t realize he’s staring back at the man until he speaks.

 

“It was you.”

 

Jason blinks at Bruce, at the way he kneels to greet the newest dog: a puppy, a mutt, named Bear. Large hands and perfect face, hiding scars the way he also does, the make-up heavier than the cigarette between his pouting lips. Bruce doesn’t say anything else, lets Bear kiss his fingers like he, too, isn’t a killer, (though indirectly,) like the gun strapped to Jason’s thigh is tipped with orange, like the knife strapped to Bruce’s is plastic.

 

“The motel,” Bruce supplies.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why?”

 

“That’s where Hell was.”

 

Bruce eyes him, his expression difficult to read, but he offers his hand regardless. Jason hands him some of the leashes, wordless, and they walk, cutting lines into the arching trees, all attempting to sun themselves, to feed, to live, and Jason finds himself cold, finds that the smoke on his clothes are not on his clothes but on his skin. And when Bruce’s hip brushes his, when the dogs pull them along the path, the bile on his tongue is no longer his own.

 

*******

 

The helmet stops working that night. He’s been blind a total of one times, and the more pressing matter had been the grave dirt in his mouth, and as he shucks the helmet, the spirit gum on his face holding the domino mask underneath steady as a surgeon, he spits like it’s there again. The heavy weight of a coffin’s door, worms on his skin like maggots, like embalming fluid, his new heart beating too fast, too hard. There’s a J on his cheek from the brand and he wears it like a police badge, like a passport, enters places like a survivor, but his hands still shake around the necks of his enemies.

 

The henchman comes at him laughing, and Jason’s fist connects with the crack of a comic book panel, and there is no make-up to hide the scars this time, nothing to disguise the memories of the explosion, of the crowbar, of every stitch he’s needed to get since he was a kid. The body is deadweight now; he kicks it aside. There’s a shadow moving in his peripheral vision, ink on the wall, cape sweeping, making Bruce seem bigger, terrifying.

 

Black Mask goes down before he can even get a hand on his revolver.

 

Jason pockets some of the coke on the table and he’s sure that Bruce can see him do it. If he bites his tongue hard enough, he can maybe swallow down the cool sting that the rebellion brings to his veins.

 

*******

 

They meet often like this: With blood on their hands and the rest on their suits, opened and pushed around to accommodate, mouths pressed like glue, one of Bruce’s hands in skunk hair, the other around them, stroking, and Jason’s knees threaten to crumble beneath him. Bruce has the taste of gunpowder on his tongue, and when cigarette breath meets him, they explode, paint themselves in the debris of a decimated building.

 

If the walls could speak, they’d slit their throats first.

 

Bruce leaves him with the bag of coke missing from his pocket. He expects as much.

 

*******

 

Carmichael is the only Golden Retriever of the pack. He’s fat, toothless, and loves ham more than humans, and he’s Jason’s favorite. He falls in line with Debra and Bear, like a family of delinquents, of outsiders at the animal shelter, on the streets, and among the other seven dogs, Carmichael (or Vroom Vroom, according to the shelter’s owner’s daughter) has the loudest personality.

 

He sits dutifully as Jason lights up, the stoop warmed by the morning sunlight, the other dogs safe in the building. Vroom Vroom’s tail thumps as it wags, tongue lolling out, and when Jason gives him a treat, he swallows it whole.

 

The man from two nights ago is across the street when he looks up. The dog barks. The man disappears with the next passing car.

 

*******

 

Jason texts, _do you believe in ghosts?_

 

 _wtf are you on today_ , responds Roy.

 

_seriously._

_if shit like aliens and witches exist, why can’t ghosts?_

*******

 

It’s not guilt that eats him. He knows this much, even as he stares into the retina scanner, even as he drops the clues that Bruce had asked for on the examination table, even as he nods to Tim when he looks up from the Bat-computer. The men had deserved it, the bodies had to be cleansed—the devil had shown him everything and though the fire had not been holy, it had burned.

 

He doesn’t do this for anything other than the wordless agreement that there are no questions anymore. Barbara’s in his ear, a bank robbery in progress, and he sees the bloody man out of the corner of his eye. In the safety of the helmet, he can tell himself that he’s hallucinating.

 

That’s more comforting than he expects it to be, honestly.

 

*******

 

Terrible people are terrible people are terrible people are—

 

He finds Bruce in the ruins of his death, and they fuck over his grave because it makes sense at the time, and as Jason is split in half and in fourths by the weight of themselves, he squeezes his eyes shut and remembers the gore, lay back and recalls every head he’s watched implode upon a bullet. He wants to kill. He is a bad person.

 

Bruce’s hand is around his throat and as Jason scratches at it, he squeezes.

 

It’s like inhaling smoke and burning his flesh at the same time, like arching into the rhythm and accepting his fate, like dying in the arms of the one man who could match him, like feeling teeth on the J: the memento of another life, and he will not die again. The pits and the devils within them are only nightmares, and those bodies in the motel are nameless and free and trapped, and there’s a splinter digging into his naked back, and every miniscule breath he is allowed builds up into his orgasm until there is only the graveyard, and Bruce does coke along the expanse of his torso later on, lets Jason do the same, lets them fall into the one run-on sentence that is their lives, and when Bruce opens his mouth to say something like a goodbye, Jason doesn’t let him.

 

He is the planchette if Bruce is the board, and for a moment, he thinks about coming back, about finding solace in that family again, about seeing the world and pretending to be okay again, so long as he is the mouthpiece for thoughts that may as well belong to him. He refuses to go. He refuses to let go.

 

And maybe they’ll end like a Greek tragedy.

 

Maybe they’ll fall like Rome did.

 

*******

 

“Buy you a drink?”

 

Bruce doesn’t look like Bruce, but he sounds like him. The beard is real, and there’s a stirring in Jason’s belly at the sight of it, at this tease and dance they play sometimes. Kori eyes the both of them but says nothing, disappears into the crowd with Roy in tow, seeking less than hiding, and she looks like the fire she’s named herself for: sexy and deadly, wild, with no respect for anything but her own boundaries. Roy is sharp enough to bleed them both.

 

He falls for them a little more every day.

 

Bruce signals for two to the bartender, starts a tab with a couple hundred dollar bills on the bar, and he can’t hide the ice of his eyes, much less the sky behind them. The flannel is too big for him, his jeans tight, his boots scuffed and held together with duct tape and Jason has never been so—

 

He downs half the whiskey in his glass in one go.

 

“How’d you find me?”

 

Bruce snorts and that’s enough of an answer.

 

“ _Why’d_ you find me?” Jason amends.

 

Bruce swallows his drink down and gestures for another, his gaze steady on Jason, on his—what did he call it?—failure, his partner, his everything else that Jason can think of right now, and there’s a heavy hand on the back of his neck, trailing down his back, resting at where his shirt ends and his jeans begin. Jason leans into it. “You’ve been seeing things,” says Bruce.

 

Jason doesn’t respond.

 

“The man you fucked.”

 

“It was meant for me.”

 

Bruce leans over, his mouth along the shell of Jason’s ear, and Jason shivers when: “You only see death, don’t you? Every single person in this place: you’ve already imagined what they’d look like blown apart or spread on your cock. It’s okay. I know.”

 

The bartender slides another glass his way and Jason’s hand trembles as he tips it back into his mouth.

 

“I should’ve known,” Bruce continues. “I should have seen it in the way you hold your guns. You fight like a god, like—” (the hand is on his ass now and no one’s looking at them in their dark corner of the bar, just another couple getting playful, fingers chaotic and knowing) “—the way I taught you, but you’re better, aren’t you? You already know you are.”

 

Jason whispers his name like the prayer he’s making, and _the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor_ , and there’s a mouth on his neck, cold with whiskey-ice, the beard scratchy in the ways he loves.

 

Bruce isn’t listening. “Lives bend to you. You’ve fucked both life and death and you’re still pretty as an angel.”

 

He’s dreamed of this, of precisely the way Bruce is overtaking him, overwhelming his senses, becoming the world and the atmosphere and every star that they keep. Jason refuses to move, lest he lose the control he’s only pretending he’s retained. Bruce kisses his jaw, sucks a mark there, owns him, _completes him_ in the way death once had.

 

The pinch of teeth on skin doesn’t wake him and he knows this is real.

 

And maybe Bruce _had_ changed since his death and his reanimation and his ultimate downfall, and maybe Bruce had snapped or worse or accepted that death did nothing but take and that it couldn’t stop itself, that Jason’s hands could only hurt, never safe, never gentle, always _take_ , and Bruce is holding him still on the barstool with his words and his mouth, but Jason can hear his own dialogue without tasting it: “They wanted sacrifices.”

 

“No. Just holes.”

 

Jason smiles a little and says, “Same difference.”

 

*******

 

Jason’s face is pressed into the grimy bathroom wall when Bruce takes him, fingernails scrabbling on the tile, on the hands like vices on his hips. One moves to his throat like a promise, squeezes to the rhythm they set up, ruthless and punishing and Bruce is whispering the entire time, “You’re so filthy, like death, pale horse ’n no way out, still got grave dirt under your nails, don’t you? Won’t let—won’t _let_ —”

 

And Jason wants to say that he’s here, that he’s been alive for the last two years, but he can feel it from behind his eyelids, can imagine the terrors and the ghosts, the metaphorical scalpel in his ass, twisting until it’s all gore and no forgiveness. He can only choke, breathe out Bruce’s name on a cough, reach back to grasp at the back of Bruce’s head and tug him in to kiss him.

 

He is fire; he has no guilt.

 

*******

 

He kicks open the door and guns down the men that aren’t hit with Roy’s arrows.

 

He says nothing at the weed in the dealer’s pockets, only takes it and double taps him twice in the head. If Roy touches him, Jason doesn’t notice. Kori takes his hand and leads him away from the scene, and if he cries, the others don’t say a word.

 

*******

 

Vroom Vroom sits with him in the morning, gobbling his breakfast on the stoop as Jason drinks his coffee. He’s sporting a shiner. The woman that owns the shelter knows not to ask. He doesn’t look up at the shadow that looms over him, blocks out the early morning sunshine. “You ruined me,” he mutters instead, scoots over to let Bruce sit.

 

“Good,” Bruce replies. He has his own coffee, or tea, Jason can’t really smell through a broken nose.

 

Jason glances at him and nods toward nothing in particular, opening and closing the fist not holding the coffee, dirty and scabbed, hiding track marks to test the lines of the undeath he’s currently living. Started and stopped and started again like cholesterol arteries, like heart attacks, like aneurysms. “Was that your plan? Fuck me and get me back?” he asks quietly. “’Cause your Jason’s dead, B. I’m the only one left.”

 

Bruce hums, inclines his head some. “Not my plan.”

 

“Then what was?”

 

“What does murder feel like?”

 

Jason pauses, gaze flicking from the sidewalk to Bruce and then to Vroom Vroom, to the dumb tongue forever hanging out of the dog’s mouth, to the rolls underneath his fur, to the thumping tail, to how he leans into the hand that offers pets and scratches. “Like freedom,” he whispers after a heartbeat, “like I’m powerful, like I’m in control for once. I choose. No one else does. Know no one else is gonna get hurt ’cause of ’em. I’m their judge. I’m their holy fuckin’ fire.”

 

“Is that what you felt at the motel?”

 

“No. Numbness, anger. I knew no one’d do anything.”

 

Bruce raises an eyebrow, sips his tea. “How?”

 

“No one did shit about Joker when I died,” he says. He looks at Bruce full-on now, the scar on his face especially noticeable in the slightly humid air, puffed and deep pink, like it’s fresh, like it’ll bleed in moments. “You didn’t. Why would anyone care about some Jane Does?”

 

“I almost—”

 

“Almost don’t cut it anymore, B. There’s no more forgiveness. I’m already like your demons. Fuck, I’m _worse_ , yet you’re still hard for me.” And now Jason’s raising his brow at him, frowning, like a loaded, smoking gun, and Vroom Vroom’s lying down now, head on his paws, ears twitching. “Hard for your little Boy Wonder, all grown up. You’re fucked in the head, B. Maybe more ’n me.”

 

Bruce’s mouth goes thin.

 

“But at least I _own_ it,” Jason continues, smirks (because fire has no morals, no guilt, he is fire). “At least everyone knows I’m unhinged. Roy ’n Kori ain’t surprised by it anymore. They know. But you? You lose control one day and everyone’s gonna go back to the Demon of Gotham shit, and you’ll feel it _hard_. And you’re gonna fall worse than any cop or mayor or shit.”

 

He knows Bruce is angry before Bruce does, he thinks, braces himself for the acid in the words that should be spewing back at him, wants the argument, wants the cost of a heart-to-heart, wants nothing more than to be left alone by his ghosts, with his ghosts—the bloodied man is in his peripheral vision, but his hands aren’t shaking.

 

Bruce kisses him and his cheeks are wet.

 

Jason doesn’t cry, he won’t cry, he can’t cry, and yet he’s leaning into it and he’s distantly aware that his coffee is spilling when he grabs for Bruce’s face and nothing they do is gentle. They devour each other because that is the only thing they know how to do when the other is concerned, and Jason can feel every blood vessel beneath Bruce’s flesh, can rake his nails down his cheekbones and feel everything part, for he is Moses and Bruce is the Red Sea.

 

“Don’t wanna kill,” Bruce mumbles against his mouth.

 

“Then don’t. Let me.”

 

“Only him.”

 

“Fuck’s sake, shut up.”

 

*******

 

The Joker is dead or dying or dead and he feels nothing.

 

He doesn’t clean the knife he’d used, only watches it drip, watches red turn to rust turn to gold.

 

*******

 

“Make it stop,” says Jason when Bruce doesn’t look up. There are no dogs this time, no bars, no suits. It’s them and the night and the place that they met, and Jason’s pushing up his sleeves for the burns and cuts to get air, to watch Bruce’s expression shift and then close in upon itself again.

 

Bruce asks, “Make what stop?” like he doesn’t know. He still steps closer, though, lets Jason loop noose arms around his neck to pull their bodies flush, and Jason is the devil and the high mountain and the splendor of the kingdoms of the world, and Bruce is the temptation to take the deal. “Make what stop, Jay?” he asks again.

 

“It didn’t make it better.”

 

“I know,” Bruce whispers.

 

When they kiss, it’s like an electrical storm: The contact is lightning, the build-up the thunder, and every single hair on their bodies is standing ruler-straight in the anticipation of the oncoming showers. Jason bites the lower lip offered to him, soothes it with a dirty tongue; the hands on his ass, in his hair feel like they belong there, and when his back is pressed against the nearest wall, it’s on the very border of painful.

 

The sensation is sensation and he’ll ride it until the next one is proffered.

 

“You believe in God?” asks Bruce. He sucks a bruise into Jason’s neck.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Gonna go to Hell?”

 

Jason coughs out a laugh, nods.

 

“Then I’ll see you there.”

 

*******

 

Bruce’s bed is too big, too comfortable, too empty for him, but the warmth of nudity and clean sheets is nearly enough to make up for it. They split cigarettes so long as Jason doesn’t put it out on himself, blow smoke on the open bite marks on their skins, and if Jason asks for more, Bruce doesn’t think twice.

 

More blood, more force, more tears, more rips, more splits, more feelings—

 

And Bruce is like a racecar in how he pushes inside him, piston fast and forever unrelenting, Jason’s legs around his shoulders; and Bruce swallows him down when he’s done, suck him over the end, to the finish line, crawl up the line of his body to kiss him hard.

 

They don’t say it, but Jason knows what it feels like, in the quiet promise of weeping insides pressing against the prisons of the flesh and the brushing fingertips like flowers before the winter. Jason will leave before Bruce awakens the next morning, and they will chase one another again, and maybe he will stay longer the next day, next time, next night.

 

*******

 

He tries to leave, but Bruce stirs and says, “Stay,” like he’s holding on to a dream, and Jason can only find himself nudging deeper into the scabs of the night before. The bloodied man can join the ghosts of the manor should it please him, the scent of death like the Yankee candles in Bruce’s bedroom, burnt down to the puddle at the bottom of the glass now. Bruce repeats into his hair, “Stay.”

 

“Not goin’ anywhere, B,” he lies.

 

Jason hears the desperate, delirious smile rather than feels it. “Stay. Please.”

 

His cheeks are wet and it’s too early for this, and he’s too dirty for this, and he’s too much of a sinner for this, for the way that Bruce is holding him, has kissed him, has done whatever he’s done in the last handful of years, and he’s still—he’s still _angry_. Jason will never stop being a murderer, will never stop being that flame that threatens to turn to a blaze, but if he can pretend, then maybe—

 

He squeezes his eyes shut when Bruce holds him tighter. “I’ll try,” he murmurs. “I’ll try, B. That’s all I can do.”

 

“Good.”

 

*******

 

In the ruins of his rebirth, Jason finds the remnants of a scalpel. When he presses it to his arm, slices the skin there, it is not his blood that seeps out from the wound, but the remnants of his ghosts’.


End file.
